Disassembly / modification of Kraft GamePad

Technology

Pad 01Some folks have received their Kraft game pad and started taking it apart – check out what some of our Makers are up to…“I’ve received my Kraft GamePad and despite not being “officially supported”, it works fine under OS X. Unfortunately, the Up-Down-Left-Right buttons map to a hatswitch, which means pressing [Left][Right] simultaneously doesn’t register properly. Is it this way under Windows, too? Anyway, the joystick reports having four unused buttons (6-10) and I’m already receiving requests from my family to “fix it or something.” Anyone taken a square-tip driver to the hard plastic box at the top of the unit and see what’s underneath? I’m looking for any tips before popping the case.” Link.

10 thoughts on “Disassembly / modification of Kraft GamePad

  1. chipsndip says:

    In the plastic box is the PCB with all the wiring. The furthest left and right wires are start and select, and the thickest center wire is ground. The four wires between ground and the outermost wires alternate between the left/right up/down hat switch buttons, and the diagonal regular buttons. If you swap pairs of wires, you wind up with regular buttons as your up/down/left/right, and the hat switch on your diagonals. This is the easiest and least invasive way of hacking this pad. If the directions don’t match up the way you’d like afterwards, you can use a program called joy2key to remap the buttons to keyboard characters.

  2. dlong says:

    What did you use to swap wires? Soldering melts the plastic or cellophane or whatever has these traces on it.

  3. pastro says:

    I ended up modding my pad by cutting four traces on the PCB and soldering two wires. I also pulled one cap. The mod disables the lower left and lower right inputs. They aren’t used in stepmania so it works fine. It’s a fairly easy mod, but you have to be adept with a small soldering iron and an exacto knife.
    I can post details if anyone wants to mod theirs.

  4. pastro says:

    I ended up modding my pad by cutting four traces on the PCB and soldering two wires. I also pulled one cap. The mod disables the lower left and lower right inputs. They aren’t used in stepmania so it works fine. It’s a fairly easy mod, but you have to be adept with a small soldering iron and an exacto knife.
    I can post details if anyone wants to mod theirs.

  5. philliptorrone says:

    please do post up!

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